KIRKUS REVIEW

The three parts of Helm’s novel each present a distinct
storyline related tenuously, perhaps, to its neighbors, but they share a vivid
tone and an unsettlingly malleable reality. This sense of a world in which
science and technology have delivered on our most paranoid imaginings, but in a
way that makes life more susceptible to strangeness instead of less, has the
odd effect of sealing the narrative tightly inside each protagonist’s head. Ali
is a scientist who has retreated to an isolated house to work up the courage to
blow the whistle on the flawed “creativity drug” that she helped design. James
is a failed poet who finds himself hired by a mysterious man and sent to Rome
to investigate the meaning of a series of poems posted anonymously on the
internet. Celia is a researcher for a drug company who discovers that her
scientist father has undergone a conversion to a vague spiritualism at the
hands of a manipulative conceptual artist. The details of their stories seem
like material for a science fiction thriller, but each character is mired in
existential confusions brought on by personal trauma, and the reader is trapped
alongside them, in prose that is sometimes excessively reflective and gestural.
Despite having murders, geopolitical strife, hacktivists, and secretive
anarchist groups, the novel muffles any suspense and momentum. The characters
think so hard about their feelings that they don’t feel them with any
conviction, though Helm often strikes upon perfectly selected details of human
interaction.

A novel that seems to aspire to a consciously literary emulation
of William Gibson but struggles with upsetting passivity.

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